Saturday, 11 June 2011

E3 Bastion

2D never died. It just got prettier, and trickier; using decades of in-built player training to form a kind of meta text back and forth between developer and player. Rather than disappear altogether, cheap price points and digital distribution have allowed 2D to become almost art-house video game language, demanding bizarro interpretation and on-fly experimentation. Bastion is the latest example of this trend, a lush indie show-stopper that mixes The Story of Thor style views with an ingenious on-fly contextual commentary that issues feedback based on what the player's actually doing. Could be this year's Limbo.